


What if Someone Vicious Had Entered: Part III

by S A G (setgree)



Series: What if Someone Vicious Had Entered? [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25885999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/setgree/pseuds/S%20A%20G
Summary: This is Part III of "What if Someone Vicious had Entered?"It takes place at Hogwarts and elsewhere in the winter and spring of 1997-1998.
Series: What if Someone Vicious Had Entered? [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878430





	What if Someone Vicious Had Entered: Part III

**Part III**

_“Just as you carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of other nations– as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world– we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want you to share the earth with them. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang."_

– _Eichmann in Jerusalem_

**Chapter 14**

**Jess’s diary**

12/28/97 10:15 pm

J’s idea worked. L+I met him in Armonk, went to some stupid town in Wales, J took us to some empty house with an open layout. Lev whispered the name, jetted, three big guys came in, I put them to sleep, J shot two, strapped a bomb vest to the third guy, we beat him to near-death with crowbars. Woke him up, broke his mind – easy with someone in that condition. Got him to take us back to his base, some estate near Oxford the guy said, gated, looked like money. Dude said only people with the DE tattoo can get in, we told him to detonate the moment he was in the door, three of us floated up. Jordan’s people do good work, house collapsed in on itself like someone letting the air out of a balloon, place was leveled, _then_ caught on fire, people came streaming out, panicked, and we got em, Jordan and me on the ground at close range, Lev up in the air. I guess he’s been practicing, kid’s marksmanship while hovering and apparating is scary. A few got away. Went down to confirm kills, mostly middle aged men, few women, some Slytherin kid. Got burgers.

Afterwards we caught up with the Sedona contingent. Lev’s parents asked where we went, Lev said that was private, his dad and a bunch of people started yelling, I think they detect the violence on us or something, Lev and I went back to back and began warding, Miller stepped in and everybody backed down. It was freaking tense. They haven’t brought it up since. I guess they realize that if I wanted to I could start withdrawing from the dead-parents-account and we could cut all ties and live anywhere. Sarah’s still 17 but us two – and forget the legal stuff, I actually think we could take them in a fight. It’s weird that there’s finally no possible coercion in our relationships. Paying for college for the three of us would be hard. Not if we go to one of the academies. Or we’ll trick someone into thinking we paid tuition I mean we’ll figure it out.

Relayed the experience to Sarah after dinner, while watching her parents kick G+N’s sorry asses – it’s nice to have them around, I like them both a lot, and it’s good for them to see people as technically skilled as Raj and Anand – and Sarah said she understood. It’s good enough for now.

The new girl Cho, I like her. Apparently she’s been training pretty full-time with the crew this year, taking time off before joining MI6. Pretty interesting back story, Sarah says she dated Potter, dated some guy Tom killed. Said she thought her training was going well and asked us to go 1-on-1, and she was pretty cool about it when Lev cracked her jaw, I mean the fire and noise flush out strategy is a good one but she just isn’t skilled enough to keep it going _and_ keep moving _and_ keep veiled, and when Lev landed that punch, it wasn’t pretty. But once Sarah healed her up she asked him how he did it. I was happy. It’s good to see humility.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. Nobody will give me a straight answer on whether I can actually reach the demons. Jordan said even he didn’t fuck with it. Said he would have considered it if Liz hadn’t made the transformation and he’d cross that bridge if she went down. But I should know what the asking price is before I contact them. Mom would know what to do. Goddamnit.

11:24

1/15/98 1:15 am

It’s freaking sweet not holding back anymore. We might be taking a huge risk for no payoff but I guess it just seems like if our alibi has gotten us this far, people generally accept that we’re like, death-eater friends or something. We’ve started taking meals at each other’s tables and nobody does shit about it. Alecto came up to Lev while he was sitting with me and the Gryffindors last week and said he was disgracing Slytherin or whatever, Lev laughed, she deducted 30 points from him, Lev put his hands up and wipes her memory, says that he deserves 3000 points and that perhaps she had some business to attend to elsewhere, Alecto parrots right back “you deserve 3000 points, I have some business to attend to elsewhere" and just walks away. No other teacher saw as far as I could tell, although who knows? One of them fixed the scoreboard later, so I guess they knew something was up. Anyway the Gs thought it was tight, Seamus has been calling him Obi-Wan in the hallways, and that was pretty much all it took to get him into the clique. Awesome.

The Slytherins were hostile at first but I stood up and called Zabini a bitch when he said some shit about Sarah being a “paki," challenged him to a fight. He was all like, I don’t fight girls, and then after dinner I followed him back to camp Slytherin and checked him into a wall and then he decided that he probably needed to accept the challenge. Said I’d meet him there in 15 minutes, which was enough time to get just freaking everybody watching in a circle, I put the kid on the floor, pinned his arm and told him if he didn’t apologize to Sarah I’d break it, he apologized effusively. I let him go, he pulled his wand out when my back was turned, like we goddamn knew he would, and Sarah stepped up next to him and knocked his shoulder out of its socket, he dropped the wand and she snapped it. Guess that’s just what we do, break Slytherin’s shit. Malfoy was cheering though, I think he just wanted to see someone else eat it for once. Also these kids probably can’t like diagnose particular injuries just from sound and sight so who knows how serious they thought it was.

Z started screaming, asking Lev to help him or whatever. Lev leaned in and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Zabini, my dear, if you ever say anything about this to anyone, or ever pull a wand on any of us, I’ll kill your mom," and then rattled off her address. Anyway Z went to the hospital wing, none of us faced any discipline or anything. Guess he kept his mouth shut. Not coincidentally the two of them stopped hooking up then. I think Lev was sick of his pure-blood shit anyway.

The Hufflepuffs: boring. Future bureaucrats. Unobjectionable though, some of them might be on our team. Ravenclaws are all right. Haven’t seen Luna again after break, not sure what the story is. Seamus remains my best buddy outside my two, kid is just a rascal, I advised him to stop with the graffiti but he was pretty good, never got caught. The Carrows keep torturing him for talking back but he doesn’t seem to mind and Lavender’s just all over him when he’s wounded. She freaking ducks when she sees me though.

Anyway now we’ve got hangers on, and partly that’s about, people saw me beat up Zabini and Lev openly defy Alecto, and partly it’s that we’re just so, so far ahead of the rest of everybody. McGonagall’s been pushing us, which is tight. Woman is crazy smart. We were talking about Animagi, and she said that American laws were less strict, and asked us if we knew any, so Sarah got up and jaguar-ed and roared at Neville, who just about peed himself scrambling onto his desk, and when she turned back we laughed so hard at him M said we’d have to leave if we couldn’t pull it together. People have been bugging her though, asking if she could teach them. I think she’s getting tired of saying that it takes even very good wizards years to get down. A lot of people just wanted to see it again though, so on Friday we’re gonna transform and fight in the Room, get a betting pool going, Lev’s going to London to get some liquor. Should be fun.

Turns out you can fly out about three minutes from the edge of Hogsmeade and then you can apparate in and out without activating the siren, but we don’t even fucking bother anymore. Siren goes when we apparate back into town and the Death Eaters come out or whatever, armed for bear, probably because of what Jordan did back in November, and we just fly back to the castle. Siren stops on its own eventually. It might be really annoying to live in Hogsmeade this year. But I’d like to think we’re undermining perceptions of Death Eater legitimacy. People ask us what we do when we’re gone but we don’t say.

Go then, Jake says. There are other worlds than these. I certainly hope so. Still, I’m pretty happy here. It’s been a good year so far.

2:04

01/20/98 4:50 pm

Got in touch with Thaumiel. It was right there in the library, had to enchant Pince which I don’t feel great about but a) it was easy and b) that woman knows a lot, pointed me right to the right book. Chose a thing that looked badass but had a reputation for predictability. Book had everything, etiquette, time and place, suggested I bring something to eat because it’s a tough trip. The demon didn’t break the summoning circle, was polite and very orderly, graciously accepted the dead rabbit I gave him, looked like a human but short with these little wings, and huge eyes, like, a quarter of his face. Their – color? depth? something I don’t have a word for – was pretty scary but I didn’t look too close and he agreed to not offer any harm for the duration of the convo. I let him out and he we talked by the fire. Offered power, temporary or permanent options, named prices. Told him I’ll think about it. After that we just chatted, exchanged stories. I told him – not really “him" I guess, more of an it, but he personified as masculine to me anyway – about killing Putnam, he told me about a Roman wizard who leveled a city looking for his kidnapped wife.

I could pay. Depends how bad we need it.

01/28/98 7:35 am

Lot of horror dreams lately, about the attack. Me, up in the air, launching the fireball, next to me, some huge monster and beneath, Sarah, and Sarah, like, two Sarahs, veiled and cloaked but I can see them, helping me summon and guide the comet. They're looking at me and they don't have any eyes. I don't know what it means but it ain't good, is it. 7:39

02/18/98 9:10 am

So we’re training a big group now. It’s up to 20-30 hours/week, sometimes out on the grounds. It’s been good, half of the Gryffindors can fire a rifle – the ones the room gave us that have next to no recoil and are crazy accurate – and maybe a quarter can veil pretty well. Also a good call to review basic strategy/come up with a Hogwarts defense plan. We’ve got them in units now, which Lev suggested we call toons (I guess that makes Sarah Ender and me Petra? Or maybe we’re all Peter?), assigned them portions of the school to get comfortable with, reviewed strategy. It’s not quite a full-fledged army but it’s the next best thing. So it’s the Patils, Seamus, Corner, Neville, Goldstein and Bones with toons, and me, Ginny, and Lev doing coordination between units/free-radical backup, and Sarah runs the show. I guess they weren’t really surprised either to hear that we’d been behind the Ginny and Neville training group. They’d seen us work in McGonagall’s class, and suddenly G+N were giving these highly complex combat lessons, they put two and two together.

Weak link whatever, if a kid gets mind-fucked they won’t see further than us, and I’m ready for those assholes.

I’m sometimes surprised by how much the Brits respect us. There’s something to be said for hierarchies based on clearly measurable skills. A week ago we had a one-on-one, throw somebody out of a translucent dome tournament, and there are pretty serious disparities so that gets rid of like 2/3 pretty fast, and then it’s just us three and Neville and Ginny, first up, Lev pushes Neville out and then me and him had a fun fight. Made the circle a little bigger for the hell of it, asked the room for like slo-mo cameras of the whole space, and Sarah put up a full-fledged, bi-directional spell-impermeable circle, which is goddamn complicated and impressive but I don’t think the Brits know that, and we went all out. Fight lasted about a minute, burned a bunch of my hair off and it came down to like a knife’s edge that when we finally made contact his hit was a little harder so I left the circle first, the room recorded it exactly like that, and people were like cheering and clapping, and Sarah gives Lev five minutes to recover, then steps up and sets up the same spell circle but from the inside.

And it was over in probably under 10 seconds. They both go invisible, I can still track them because of this freaking-school-telepathy-enhancing-shit but sure as hell no one else can, Lev starts throwing major league fire and lightning and Sarah is just teleporting in total silence in the cooler spaces in the fire’s wake, twice as fast as anyone should be able to move, gets her coil around his ankle, yanks him _up_ out of the dome, breaks the circle, then throws him down onto the floor, where just for good measure she’s already waiting unveiled and gets her clawed hand around his throat. I guess the Brits hadn’t really known how big the gap was. Ginny forfeited right then. Everybody else is silent with their mouths hanging open like idiots. Well you don’t see a world-class combat wizard go all out very often in a lifetime. On top of that we’ve been doing large-scale war-games, people taking turns as commander, and whenever Sarah’s up, her team wins. So that’s it then. She’s Supreme Allied Commander or whatever we end up calling her.

It was weird for a few days, people asking me questions about Sarah and how she got like that like I’m going to tell them some secret about a dark ritual or something. And I just keep telling them, practice. We train like crazy all the time and we have since we were kids and especially since armed psychopaths tried to wipe us out.

And these kids get it. They’ve lost a lot of people. Bones, that girl is tough as nails and I think she’s last woman standing in her family. She and Lev have been hanging out. I think she might his first friend since Darren died, which is nice.

The rest of them too. Last Tuesday middle of the night I couldn’t sleep so I went to the room to do some target practice and there were like 5 of ours already there. And we’ve got the skills they want to learn. People were spontaneously saluting to Sarah when they saw her until she asked them to stop. But still, our 30 are congealing around us. And it feels good.

And the claws played a part in that too, though I guess fear and respect aren’t the same thing. When we have them out no one wants to get within five feet, they’re extra cautious, not thinking straight, so we’ve been playing with them sheathed. But people know what’s up. God, when we showed them off for the first time. Four inch metal talon on each finger, come out when you say “grow," retract at “retract." Lev sliced straight through the leg of a metal table, Sarah showed that you can still easily grip a gun or sword or something with them on. Seamus just starts laughing, asked for a pair of his own. Lev told him he’d knit him a pair when he had better hand-to-hand skills so he wouldn’t take his own eyes out.

When did we first think of trying the Wolverine thing? Guess when we were watching the cartoon back in middle school? Feels now like Sarah's gloves this summer were just a prototype, this time we had Snape’s book, lots of good shit in it on permanently altering the makeup of physical materials, and the room gave us a modern chem lab and a metal shop -- ended up with something lightweight, thin, strong, malleable. Sarah consulted a bit with Slughorn on some of the theory, and we worked.

But Lev’s enchantment skills needed to step up too. He’s been teaching a group of them and he said that doing so made him just a ton better. The gloves are his best work.

Sarah, my captain the spell-maker, the girl is a demon. I’ve got more straight firepower I think but her speed advantage is insurmountable. And I wonder about Lev, how many better assassins out there? His aim while flying and invisible is incredible. He could drop someone in Sarah’s league if he ambushed her. He has skills that would be in demand. I don’t think it would be a good life.

We’re kicking it though. I’m having a great time working with them. And I should admit that I’m enjoying their admiration/awe. We earned it.

2/22/98 10:32 pm

No more bomb missions, the DEs got savvy. We did the same lure and they sent one in to investigate, we subdued him, and then a bunch more came out from behind veils and started firing. Last one in looked insane and she had her own vest on, assholes taking our best idea, and Jordan broadcast for us to get out immediately, anti-disapparation spell had already been cast but we got a few thousand feet straight up and bailed. Too close. Reconvened at his place, told us he knew the woman whom we’d seen, a friend from the old times, must have been under the imperius curse or something. Still the missions were pretty successful. Jordan put our known kill count at 65, which is not bad, considering that we’re almost certainly under-counting, and zero casualties. Well I guess the woman Jordan knew counts. But she was dead in the water anyway. Sucks to get caught.

Sarah thinks Snape deliberately gave us that intel. That if he knew Lucas, then he knows about our crew and probably has the whole thing figured out. I don’t know man. Killing Dumbledore’s a pretty big strike against him. But we weren’t there so who knows.

So, yeah. We’re hanging out, waiting. Still training. Sometimes with everybody in the room, sometimes just the three of us in the Forest, or us three and Neville, Ginny and Seamus. Sometimes we see teachers out there, and some of them pretend not to see us and others yell at us and we just confound them and keep going. We’ve been going home a lot, checking in with the crew. Don’t know how he swung it but Lev told them that he had reliable information that Jordan had been exploiting the Tom thing but had stopped because the DEs had gotten their shit together, didn’t tell them how he got that information. I bet his folks are worried. Fuck it though. Part of the plan was to improvise. We got intelligence and we acted on it. And I figure, we must be tying up some percentage of DE resources, maybe that’s helping HP and his crew out. I wonder how they’re doing. I’m assuming they’re still alive which TBH is better than I expected.

Also Sarah got into Yale and I guess she’s going there next year. It’s looking like Lev and I are going to the Naval academy together which should be cool, Nate said their wizard training group was solid.

11:00

2/26/98 12:05 am

Holy fucking shit have these past few days sucked. I’m feeling better. Can do magic again. Classes were bad. McGonagall asked what was wrong and I nearly lost it. Guess now I know what it was like for Sarah to be there, then. At the attack. God it was worse than that. A tailored apocalypse. who was the man in blue

But it worked, put me and Neville and Lev and Seamus and Ginny on the ground. And I’ve seen some pretty fucking severe post-trauma stress but I really thought for a moment we weren’t going to get Ginny back, that she was just going to sit there screaming forever. Neville, man. He talked to her. Love trumps. Sarah said she felt horrible afterwards, both doing it and because she’d done it to us. Anybody can kill a man. That was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window, and he’ll fall. Takes a different skill set to upend one, to make him want to kill himself. It might have been the worst experience of my life.

Sometimes it seems like Sarah’s the only thing keeping us tethered. But she’s just one step from being another Jordan and then where would we be? Fucking everything is nothing and I’m literally holding a part of my soul in my hand. Stupid and inadequate. Hysterical and useless. At least there’s Radiohead.

I’m going to fucking punch Sarah for putting me through that. How could she? How could she?

2/28/98 10:30 pm

I did. Crossing paths in the hallway. She saw it coming and didn’t do anything. She said she was sorry again and that she loved me. Nobody knew what to do and Ginny started screaming at her, looked like she was going to go down after her, Sarah sitting on the ground with her eye swelling shut, but Padma steered Ginny away and we kept walking.

Fuck everything, I still love her. I’ll forgive her. I wonder sometimes if the DEs’ kids will ever forgive me and Lev. I guess if it comes to it I’ll kill them too. 10:41

3/09/98 11:12 pm

Neville’s on the run, living in the Room and getting food from some shopkeeper. Still wants to train. Told us they went after his grandma and she put a guy in the hospital, which, goddamn, that’s sweet. It’s funny that it wasn’t when they tried to steal Gryffindor’s sword last semester that tipped it, but apparently Amycus heard him talking shit about Alecto and after they went after Augusta he got word from Minerva and realized all bets were off. He asked us to stop holding back so much. I feel bad sometimes. That scar under his eye isn’t going to fade I think, but I told him I thought it looked badass, and he blushed. He’s such a sweetheart. The soft kid we saw get his ass kicked by the Carrows is gone. He can take a punch with the best of them.

He’s dealt with his share of real shit too. Lev and he did the memory-attack thing to each other, Lev hit the kid with what it was like to see Darren and my mom get brought in and then me go down, the “savagery of the next few black minutes" he said, and Neville hit him right back with the helplessness he felt when Bellatrix got busted out of Azkaban, the shame he used to feel about his parents. Neither of them can do what Sarah did but we can all make someone feel like they were there. Lev cried. I rocked him and the room gave us a couch and he went to sleep.

I forget sometimes how damaged he is. My dear. This was good. How out of control he was, back after the attack, when his magic came back, when he’d just break down at unexpected moments and things would start exploding. The time I tackled him and took the two of us out to nowhere so he wouldn’t hurt anyone. But this time it was just him. Maybe healing isn’t out of reach. 12:00.

3/22/98 3:33 am

Cho’s joined us now, at Nate’s suggestion, sleeping in the room most nights. Bunch of Gryffindors followed suit, room got bigger and got a girl’s quarter. Getting food from some shopkeeper or something. Place has turned into a real home, nice bathrooms. I wonder who’s having sex? The Brits are weirdly coy sometimes. Anyway, Cho is a champ at this point, fast and creative and when she gets amped up, vicious. Past year has been great for her, and everybody really respects and likes her, so she got a toon. Bones is on team guerrilla tactics with me and Lev, which is a better fit, and Lev knit her a pair of clawed gloves, which she’s psyched about.

Cho’s basically second-in-command now. I’m down with it. Cho’s smart, inspires loyalty, sees the big picture. I prefer small theater. And Lev was born for sabotage. People were talking about making Cho in charge of the whole operation but Cho knows what’s up, called Sarah a “clearly superior tactician and fighter." Goddamn right she is. Sarah thoroughly kicked her ass a few months ago in Sedona and I guess Cho hasn’t forgotten.

Lieutenant General Chang. I like that.

Haven’t been going back home much lately. Lev’s parents always seem like they’re about to yell at him about something. I think they know, somehow, about Jordan and all that. It’s been uncomfortable. But I don’t mind. I like it here. Been going to Levs’s grandpa’s place in the outback a bit. Lucas is a good guy, gives us good meals. Doesn’t ask too many questions. Knows things are tense between Lev and his folks.

I told Peter we should stop seeing each other. He’s a nice guy but I don’t find his drama as entertaining as I once did. It’s happening, I can feel it in my bones. We’re gonna go all out. Crew said the Horcrux would take away your ability to feel deeply. I don’t know, I’m pretty happy right now. The song. The fucking song we’ll sing over their bones, loved one.

4/18 about 10

Carrows are in open panic now. Snape’s MIA, haven’t seen him in a couple weeks, takes meals in his office or something. So it’s just the Carrows repping the whole team and at this point even the Slytherins don’t respect them. Some of them or their parents might be on Tom’s side but at the end of the day they’re just teenagers. We just had to show them that the Carrows ain’t shit, and now it’s kind of chaos everywhere.

Ginny’s gone, they miss her bad. Apparently HP and crew had a close encounter with the DEs and now they know the Weasleys are in our camp. Not sure why she went to her family and not hiding out with the Gs but she left in a hurry, I guess she had her reasons. Protect her folks or something. I miss her. She was, I don’t know, someone non-judgey to talk to. And damn her blindfolded accuracy with those knives, she’s like a jedi or something. But it’s going down. I’m pretty excited. People been coming up to us asking if there’s a plan. I tell them, if they make a move, we kill them all. Even if they don’t, maybe we should kill them all. The Gryffindors don’t like that plan for some reason, don’t think it’s specific enough. I think it’s very specific, covers all cases. Bones said it was the best plan she’d ever heard.

It’s nice out, I’ll ask S+L if they want to set up hammocks by the lake.


End file.
